A couple more elements of snuff culture I left out. Snuff bumming etiquette seemed to be more complicated than one would expect. With cigarettes it's easy. They're already divided into twenty a pack. With snuff, there was always gray area. "Hey, goddamnit! How much do you got there?" "I just took a little bit!"
Which reminds me of the old snuff commercials. Very instructional: "Just put a pinch between your cheek and gum..." Or am I dreaming that?
I also remember the guys whose jeans were painfully tight such that their snuff can and wallet wore white patches in their back pockets after two or three wearings. The sign of a prosperous man at my junior high was he who had snuff rings worn into both back pockets.
I think I was in ninth grade when they decided to crack down. First, they outlawed the wearing of jeans jackets in class so guys couldn't hide their spit pouches. Second, they said that they would suspend students who had visible snuff specks on their teeth. I remember clearly Tom Leasure protesting to Mr. Pete Kundrat, "What if we just ate a Chocolate Dee-Lite, and we got bits of chocolate cake on our teeth?" Kundrat responded with something like, "Well, you shouldn't be eating Chocolate Delights in class anyways."
Snuff usage became more clandestine. The dips got smaller, the spitting less frequent. How many times did I try to talk to someone, only to have them look at me and gesture, unable to open their mouth because it was full of tobacco juice?
Then, for some reason I seem to recall a lot of people pulling down their lower lips to show that either they did or did not have a dip in. Either way, it was just short of revolting.
Every once in a while, the kid with an actual chaw of chewing tobacco in his cheek would show up like a guy who wondered off the set of a western onto the set of junior high movie. Or he looked lie a lumberjack who just came to town for supplies. Always the original, Jimmy Barr talked about neither dippin or chaw, but plug tobacco. I can't remember if he had uncles or grandfathers who would cut themself a plug, but if the chewing tobacco kid seemed out of date, the plug guys might have well been working on the Erie Canal. It would have been great if I had upstaged them all by whipping out a snuff box and packing my nose like an 18th century gentleman. If only I knew then what I know now, man, I would've been the coolest guy in New Cumberland.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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2 comments:
At Mt. Lebanon when I was in 9th grade, there was a huge port craze. It was extremely difficult to decant the wine and keep it chilled to a perfect fifteen degrees in your locker between classes, which led to some ingenious applications of ice packs and coolers to crystal decanters concealed in backpacks. We all kept snifters in our jean jackets and had to have our orange drink in the snifters to cover the scent of the port, which led to some fist fights over the boy's room sink as everyone wanted to wash their glasses as much as possible to get out the orange tannins, perilous to fine port. Of course, the tawny port gang would get out of hand, insisting that proper port should be at twenty degrees. It still makes my skin crawl to think of drinking port at twenty degrees! Of course, we had the predictable "Bishop of Norwich" trouble, particularly with the younger kids. Of course, these things ran their course, as they so often do, and by 1986, we were deep into the saffron truffle fad. How well I remember, Scott Hirsch with "Rustler," his truffle-snuffling pig, both striding arrogantly through the halls, going on and on about their ideas for refining stilton cheese.
I knew it. I knew you rich bastards would have some kind of fancy pants fad. Too good for smokeless tobacco? You think you're better than us? Is that it? If you don't have a huge dip in the next time I see you, I'll know that you think you're better than me, and I break your god damn port snifter into a thousand pieces.
PS - I would be very surprised if there were as many hillbillies at Mt. Lebanon as there were in New Cumberland. Are you trying to say you had more hillbillies than we did? Does that make you think you're a big man, with all your hillbillies?
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